Ask HN: I'm a chronic procrastinator – how do I break it?

Willpower is a muscle, which uses the same resource as brain tasks (programming, arguing)[1] - let's call it "cognitive energy".

1) don't waste cognitive energy on silly tasks (games, arguing in comment threads, etc.)

2) practice exercising willpower - it's a muscle, you can train it to be better. Start by forcing yourself to complete a routine every morning (the trick with habit forming is to not give up after you miss a day.) examples of habits to form below.

3) look into mindfullness meditation[2] - this can help you identify distracting thoughts as they arrive and practice ignoring them.

Meditating is a good habit to form as practice, and it will also help you get better at habits. You could also exercise on a schedule (and record when you do, including how heavy you lifted/how fast you were running). Eventually, with a stronger willpower-muscle, you'll be able to choose the fruit salad over the cake, even when you've just spent your 7.5 hours a day coding.

I've not found pomodoro to work for me as an easily-distracted person, it's better when you're prioritising work tasks (e.g. 25 code vs 5 email) and even then, 25 mins is too short for good programming "flow".

This is a hard problem, everyone has trouble with it. Good luck!

[1] http://seriouspony.com/blog/2013/7/24/your-app-makes-me-fat (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6124462 )

[2] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mindfulness-practical-guide-finding-... (US edition: http://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-practical-guide-finding-fr... )

Block hackernews. Block reddit.

It's harmful for health.

+1. Software engineering trained me to go for root causes rather than symptoms. As "get your shit together" books go, this one goes the deepest towards the roots of procrastination. Actually it is time for me to re-read it, I spend too much time on HN :-)

I often struggled with this as well. When you go through life with practically no effort and somehow achieve many things that are hard for others, it's easy to feel guilty. Especially because most of our parent's generation lived their lives diligently working 8 hours a day, advancing their career, eventually settling down etc and that seems to be the expectation for us as well. I'd just not worry about it and live your life the way you think works best.

One thing that helped me was to stop thinking "How can I get myself to work 8 hours a day?" and start thinking "What fun, useful things can I do with the 8 hours a day I'm not working.?" The only reason I read the internet and played flash games all day was because I was supposed to be at my computer, working. Overall that's a pretty low-fun and low-reward activity, though. If you accept that you won't work more than 3 hours anyway, you can do much more engaging/fun/interesting things with the rest of the time.

You mention that you wish you'd done more sports. Great, start doing sports. With your income, you can easily get a gym trainer or trainer in any sport you'd like to learn. Set yourself the goal to complete a mini triathlon next year, join a recreational volleyball league or anything else you like. You can also learn how to cook really well, enroll in a language school (for human languages), volunteer to teach kids how to code, etc. Those are all things that you'll probably enjoy and that I'm much less likely to procrastinate. Learn how to play an instrument or sing (again, you can afford a teacher to get off the ground) or pick up a hobby closer to your work like electrical engineering. The possibilities are endless once you accept that you're not "supposed to" work all day; unless you want to, and that day will come.

You can even take it one step further and just up and leave. Spend a few years traveling every corner of the world and earn your keep with a day or two of contracting each month. I know nobody who's done that who'd consider it a waste of time in any sense of the word.

Hope this helps and best of luck. Don't be so hard on yourself.